Untitled #1 ("Outside a Union-Pacific...")

Outside a Union-Pacific locomotive of poets

I dream, a jump-cut sequence

compressed and stored from old Westerns:

an overhead shot

of bandits riding in an explosion of dust,

projected over their piston saddles,

afraid the horses’ legs might

break to keep up with the steam engine.

A glove reaches for the rail, drops the reins

and leaps, kicking off the horse’s neck.

With bullets between my feet,

kerchiefed men shout “dance, boy, dance,”

this body moves like a rattlesnake

and not as if life depended on it, but love--

In the name of the love

that sits and waits for you to approach it,

what brings your velocity toward us tonight?

Not this one-sided waltz,

this confusion between attacker and target.

My hands are shantytowns in the air,

emptied shantytowns.

How delightful a torment

settled by who moves quickest first. Evening

like a swarm of irascible insects in the tall grass.

The way we buy and sell beauty

arms deep, bartering in its unlimited re-coining.

Take it, heist whatever unsnuffed peace you find.

Reader, I only ask what all folk ask

of their conquerors, as all the instincts

stuck in me sputter an entire history

of overtaken muscles: mercy, mercy, mercy.